my tv station in the morning plays the same story every 15 minutes from 4 am until 7 when they hand it off to the new york team who tells the national story of the day 2 or 3 times before i can get away and listen to it on the radio.

then I see all the pop ups from internet news, yahoo, google, whoever I have on my email news blasts

from huffington post or email blasts from my senators or local political folks, or people I like to hear from.

i have begun to do podcasts and downloaded music to stay away from the antimotivational news

but the twins are doing good, the lynx are wonderful again cmon lindsey whalen… and the vikings don’t suck yet. the timberwolves should be really wonderful this year. the soccer stadium is going to be fun and

the joy through sports seems shallow but it is kind of like taking pride in the guthrie theater and the minnesota orchestra or the st paul chamber orchestra the voyageurs national park, minnehaha falls or the fact that we have winter.

lots to pay attention to out there in the world. the news knows what people say they want to know about but i wonder if there would be a place for the good news station on the dial. i know i’d tune in.

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34 thoughts on “Ostrich or Monkey?”

There are so many negative things happening that I can barely stand to expose myself to the news. Yet at the same time, I cannot avert my gaze. So I can’t avoid the news even though it makes me almost physically ill.

The Trail has been a calming, silly diversion for me on several extended. occasions. The politics of our nation and the negative news at this time are stressful, so the Trail is again my diversion. Now that it is ours to maintain, I am more invested in its survival. The visitors who poke their heads in for a comment are kind of fascinating and mysterious, as well.

I love the entire evolution of the blog over time. Just like life, the question is always “What happens next?”

I don’t read newspapers or news magazines nor do I watch tv news. The only news I receive is the morning few minutes of MPR. I do receive notices on FB but very seldom read them except for environmentsl issues and I do often share those…especially when they are positive such as the many city’s vowing to go green and issues with plastic bags.
I do not have the mental ability to absorb ‘news’ and not get emotionally upset. My career has never required me to be politically aware or active and I don’t have the energy for that and my work so I have been s hermit for over 25yrs & ive maintained my sanity.

As for what I love most about the trail…
It is the first thing I go to mornings with my coffee. The articles are always entertaining and interesting…as are the responses. It is like reading a book and learning about the characters…since I’ve never met any of you other than through your writing. I simply enjoy the ‘Trail’ and all the people.

After the presidential election, i just couldn’t bring myself to follow the news. We haven’t had a subscription to the StarTribune for several years– it had gotten so lightweight that it just wasn’t worth reading anymore. The radio in my vehicle had, prior to the election, been invariably tuned to MPR news, but suddenly it was just too much.

Coincident with the election, my truck was totaled in an accident and the replacement vehicle was equipped with Bluetooth, which allows me to easily connect to an iPod or iPhone and draw from an extensive playlist of music of my choice or from podcasts. Since switching vehicles, I’ve scarcely played the radio at all. With so much of the news so upsetting, I find I’d rather read it when I’m in the mood than get it filtered through an announcer.

I get my news through a variety of online sources. I try to avoid those with an obvious confirmational bias. The progressively-oriented ones—the ones I tend to agree with—are almost as unsatisfying to me as the outrageously conservative ones. It’s all just preaching to the choir and that goes nowhere.

I read a lot of history, especially nineteenth century history. History affords frequent opportunities to draw parallels between current events and past ones with the added benefit of perspective. So much is cyclical. It’s like reading the news from an omniscient perch.

Bill, your assessment of the Star Tribune might improve if you could compare it with papers in other regions. Or, then again, perhaps you would be just as critical. I was surprised to learn that the best newspaper in Oregon (The Oregonian) was shallow, predictable and utterly boring. For all its faults, the Strib covers Minnesota issues well enough that I read its online version each day.

yea i get tired of too much news especially when repeated over and over. can’t stand it.
it could be the offstage drama at the local theater or the same drumpf news we’ve been hearing eventually i have to turn it off. i have a co-worker who’s a pessimist and worrier in the first place and he watches all the news shows. then tells me about it. oh please, stop watching so much news! it’s not good for you!

bill, you called the Strib ‘light’, you haven’t seen the Rochester Post Bulletin. I get the headlines emailed from the strib, then I try to watch the local news on tv. mpr headlines round out my news.

The Trail; I know the comments will be rational and well thought out. We don’t allow trolls here and I appreciate that!
And the stories are always a treat. It’s healthy to be surrounded by friends.

There are so many news sources, but no matter where you get your news from, it’s bound to be depressing. Yet, I feel an obligation/need to be well informed, so I read a smattering of national and world news, mostly on line.I read a selection of articles, some news, some op-eds, from the NYT and WAPO, and augment that with the Pioneer Press for local news.

I have a friend who is a news junkie, and she’s in a perpetual state of outrage and despair; that can’t possibly be good for you. At some point you have to decide when you’ve had enough, and balance that out with lighter fare.

What I appreciate most about the trail, I think, is the eclectic range of topics we discuss, plus the fact that after a while, it feels as if you know everyone here even if you have never met in person – which, of course, most of us have. I love that you can participate as much or as little as you like; if you feel like commenting, you’re welcome to, and if you don’t, no hard feelings. Feels like a rag tag bunch of friends tied together by a common thread, but loosely enough that it allows for individual idiosyncrasies to flourish.

I only found the news and information stations after 9/11, and got hooked whenever I was in the car. Lately I’ve started listening again to the classical station when driving. I listen to some news on MPR; we turn on the PBS News Hour sometimes, esp. Fridays for Mark Shields and David Brooks. And we can get Democracy Now on a public radio channel out of Austin, MN, but it’s usually just too depressing. I like the more light-weight news: Political Junkie on Kerri Miller, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me… I try to never miss CBS Sunday Morning, where I always learn something news, there is almost always something uplifting, and they generally only spend about 4 minutes on todays headlines.

Unfortunately I check in to msn.com on the computer – as Jacque mentioned, the “freak show” from which I can’t always avert my eyes.

So I spend more time on the trail. This is my kind of news, with people I care about (yes, you can care about even those you’ve never met, when you learn as much about each other as we do here). What I like best is, as PJ said, how eclectic our topics are. One day you can have some fluff about intertwined carrots, and the next day a thoughtful discussion of the current state of affairs. And it is fun that new people keep finding us interesting enough to hang out with us. Thanks, everybody.

We are living in dark times for news. The number of news outlets (counting all, including the internet and from entertainment shows that include news) has never been so great. But the amount of money being spent on actual reporting is dangerously inadequate.

My recent moves make it clear that local papers and TV stations are becoming copies of each other, with everyone heavily dependent on national and international content in the form of video that evokes emotions.

Local papers used to have seasoned reporters who followed local politics and local police activity. Those folks are gone. Local papers and TV news shows don’t even pretend to cover state politics except for scandals. And their coverage of crime is limited to bits of inflammatory video that they all share.

Instead of paying reporters to haunt the halls of city and state government, news shows now present video snatches from all over the world. If it excites emotions, it runs. A Detroit-based TV news show will ignore pressing Detroit issues and run, instead, video of a cop manhandling a nurse in Utah. And why not? The video excites strong emotions and apparently costs nothing to recycle. The NBC National News Report looks a whole lot like the local news shows running in Oregon or Minnesota, and they resemble each other. Professionalism and originality are apparently luxuries the current system cannot reward.

I think before I found the Trail, I must have had the wrong kind of friends. They provide Acceptance – if you pretty much think and act like they do. And they appreciate and respect personal differences and opinions only if they are very, very minor. Minor as in you like pepperoni pizza and I like mushroom pizza and that’s okay. But I’ve encountered resistance to the fact that I like cats better than I like dogs. Because apparently dogs are objectively better than cats.

One example of appreciating differences of opinion: for a while Steve and I were working on editing the same photos. I would send him an untouched photo and he would tweak it and send it back to me, while I would do my tweaking here.

We often ended up with photos that looked quite different – in fact, at least once I used the word “garish” when commenting on one of his edits. But! I learned so much from seeing what he did. When he explained what he did, I started to learn more about certain features of the software that I had not used much before. I started to be more bold in my editing and using features that I had previously overlooked – and I think overall my editing has improved. I tended to be too timid – who knows why, since anything I do with the software can be undone if I don’t like it – and was stuck in a rut.

Sometimes I preferred my edit to his, but there were also times when I much preferred his edit to mine. I learned to be more sensitive to skin tones in the few pictures I shot of people. I learned to pinpoint the saturation and luminance levels of particular colors in photos. If his edits and mine had been close to the same, I would not have learned nearly as much – plus, it was fun and challenging to see how another person viewed the same image.

This is perhaps a somewhat superficial example of appreciating differences, but I see in it a lesson for life.